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The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Paste a DOI, URL, or ISBN. Get a fully formatted reference in APA 6th edition — hanging indent, sentence-case title, italicized journal, publisher city for books, et al. at six or more authors. The matching in-text citation comes back with it. Free, no signup.
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APA 6 was published in 2009 and dominated social-science writing until APA 7 replaced it in late 2019. Most journals and universities have since migrated, but APA 6 still shows up in three places: older course handouts that haven't been updated, a handful of journals that kept the older edition for continuity, and theses being submitted under guidelines locked in before 2020. If your assignment or journal still calls for APA 6, the rules below apply — and the generator gets them right.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
APA 6 uses author-date in-text: (Author, Year). Ampersand inside parentheses, "and" outside. Three to five authors list every name on the first citation, then collapse to et al.. Six or more authors use et al. from the first citation. Direct quotes add p. xx after the year.
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)
Reference-list entries hang-indent half an inch. Articles use sentence-case titles; journals stay in title case and italicized along with the volume number. Books include the publisher's city — "New York, NY: Random House" — which APA 7 later dropped. DOIs render as doi:10.xxxx or http://dx.doi.org/10.xxxx, not the bare https://doi.org form APA 7 prefers.
https://doi.org/ URLs — APA 6 uses the older doi:10.xxxx form.Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in APA 6. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.
A handful of journals stuck with APA 6 after APA 7 launched. Some graduate programs locked in style guides before 2020 and still require APA 6 for theses submitted under those rules. And older course handouts often haven't been updated. Always check your syllabus or journal submission guidelines before defaulting to APA 7.
Three to five authors: list every name on the first citation, then use et al. on subsequent citations. Six or more authors: use et al. from the first citation. This differs from APA 7, which collapses three+ authors to et al. immediately.
Use doi:10.xxxx or http://dx.doi.org/10.xxxx. APA 6 didn't standardize on the https://doi.org/ form that APA 7 adopted. The generator outputs the correct APA 6 format automatically.
Yes. APA 6 books require City, ST: Publisher — for example, "New York, NY: Norton." For international publishers, use city and country ("Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press"). APA 7 dropped this field.
Probably yes — APA 7 has been the default since late 2019 and most institutions have moved over. But if your specific assignment, journal, or thesis program still requires APA 6, follow those rules. The generator supports both editions side by side.
The basic format is identical: (Author, Year) with page numbers for quotes. The difference is the et al. threshold (six+ in APA 6, three+ in APA 7) and a couple of edge cases around shortened group-author names.
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
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